At the same time you excuse rich countries such as the US or Germany who actively choose to continue to buy oil from authoritarian regimes even as they invade our allies - simply because buying oil elsewhere would be expensive and politically inconvenient.
I don’t understand your logic.
Remember, the sanctions against average Russians will absolutely result in shortages of food, medicine and other essential supplies. Many everyday Russians will likely starve or die from these sanctions. This isn’t about how quickly they can replace their old iPhones.
You are completely wrong here. The sanctions are against Russia to cripple their war machine, not the Russian people.
And Russia, with its immense natural resources, could easily afford to care and feed its citizens regardless of the relationship with the west, if only their oligarchs hadn't dilapidated the country's wealth for their personal gain. So it's hardly the west's fault that the Russian government steals from its own people (literally) and spends whatever wealth it has left bombing innocent people in Ukraine instead of spending it caring for its people.
Russia is not the victim here, and Russian people starving is not the west's fault but it's Russia's own fault and their leaders' fault. Period.
Oligarchs and authoritarians in Russia have options and resources to weather the storm. Many everyday Russians live close to hand to mouth and they will suffer. I don’t accept the decision to dehumanize an entire nation’s citizens for the acts of their authoritarian elite.
The Russian kings and knights and rooks and bishops will be fine. It is the pawns or plebs who will suffer the most.
They are innocent in my eyes, having only committed the crime of being born within the wrong arbitrary political boundaries.
It's not though. The west doesn't come to Russia and shove their grubby hands into the bank accounts of ordinary Russians to steal their money, resources and taxes, and starve them to death. Russia does that to their citizens and bares the sole responsibility of these actions, not the west. Like come on, Russia can choose to stop the wear at any time and the sanctions would be lifted but they're not doing that.
>I don’t accept the decision to dehumanize an entire nation’s citizens for the acts of their authoritarian elite.
So we should just let Russia invade whatever country it wants and kill their way through Europe because otherwise ordinary Russian citizens might suffer? What about Ukrainian citizens and their suffering? What about the poor pensioners in Eastern Europe who won't be able to afford the increased energy bills due to the war and might die because instead of buying medicine, now have to pay insane energy bills? What about the European taxpayers who will now have to pay increased costs to house and care for millions of displaced Ukrainian refugees? So Russia and Russians are not the only ones paying the price for Putin's actions, all of Europe is.
By your logic, you would have let Hitler exterminate an entire continent because fighting Germany would have been tough on the innocent people of Germany for the acts of their leader (not that it wasn't, but Hitler had to be defeated and that was the price). Except that now, to defeat Putin, instead of going to war with Russia and have millions of people needlessly die on both sides, we can bankrupt Russia and cripple it from the inside, and have minimal casualties on both sides (Europeans will also suffer from the war and these sanctions but the important thing is we save Ukraine and as many Ukrainians as we can, as I doubt Putin will ever see a trial in the Hague for his war crimes).
- A few weeks ago it was Canada freezing bank accounts of their political opponents.
- The US still allows for civil forfeiture of arbitrary assets with no presumption of innocence or conventional due process.
- A little while back Cyprus arbitrarily stole private funds from innocent civilians who had committed no crime - just because the gov said they needed it to bail out their bankers
- The EU has had negative nominal interest rates for some time stealing money from savers for the benefit of central bank policy
- Nearly all western governments have had negative real interest rates on savings for some time. This is a conscious policy to inflate their currencies through money printing in order to more easily manage their national debts.
I didn’t read that from OP’s post and I don’t understand what exactly you are claiming here.
Do Russian oligarchs steal from the bank accounts of ordinary Russians or is there another mechanism of theft?
Any time West puts sanctions on oligarchs Putin makes a law so they can pay less taxes, meaning ordinary people keep paying taxes for them
If I recall correctly the government took trillions from ordinary citizens to pay out the banking elite as a thank you for the bankers and rating agencies committing rampant fraud in MBS and CDOs - all while none of them were ever charged with crimes and none went to jail. Many bankers even received massive bonuses from taxpayer-funded bailout funds as well.
For example the city of Montreal is notorious for similar corruption in their road construction industry. Other cities are known to operate with similar collusion, though it isn’t as widely reported.
If Nancy Pelosi was Russian we would certainly call her an Oligarch as it is widely known she has a net worth of $200 million+ on a salary of a few hundred thousand per year.
She gained her enormous wealth by feeding insider information, which she gained from her privileged position, to her husband, so he could insider trade and front-run the American people stealing from their 401ks and other investment accounts.
Insider trading is only a crime for regular Americans, not congress or senators. It is perfectly legal for them to insider trade all day long. Guess who wrote those laws?
Also, Pelosi isn’t the only American politician who abuses their power by insider trading - only the most successful.
No, absolutely not but that is a false dichotomy and I think you also know that. This isn’t a simple binary choice between doing nothing and imposing broad-stroke sanctions on every single citizen of Russia.
One simple first step could be for the US and Germany and the rest of Western Europe to simply stop buying oil from Russia and thereby cut off further direct funding for Putin’s war. We know that sanctions on regular citizens hurt regular citizens while cutting off oil purchases directly impedes the Russian state’s ability to wage war. Which do you think would be more effective?
As for increasing energy costs on Europeans and also Ukrainians who I understand are paying up to half their take-home wages to heat their homes, I think the easiest course of action would be for Western governments to directly subsidize energy prices in the short term while simultaneously cutting fuel and carbon taxes on those affected.
I don’t agree with your assessment of my logic that I would let Hitler exterminate anyone and I would appreciate it if we could keep the discussion civil.
I am not your enemy. I want this war to end ASAP as much as you do. We are simply advocating different strategies to achieve the same goal - peace.
Again, the west is not attacking Russian citizens, but the Russian government. We can't change the fact that ordinary Russians are subject to the Russian government and therefore will also suffer to a degree no matter how you try to slice the sanctions. Especially when Russia would rather destroy European food rather than give it to its starving people.[1] So if Russia is actively harming its own people how can we expect to protected them if their own government won't?
You can't just keep repeating the trope that the west is actively harming the Russians citizens when its their own government doing it. Yeah, living in a corrupt country with shitty leaders is bad for the people living there but it's not the west's responsibility to improve it for them. Ultimately, it's up to the Russian people to revolt against their government and fight for a better future, same how other countries did it. The price of freedom is always high.
That doesn’t mean I advocate arbitrarily punishing innocent civilians for the actions of their rulers - especially when those rulers are proven to be authoritarians who can and will ruthlessly crush dissent from their populace.
If you read my other comments on this thread you will see I shared some ideas that I believe would both be more targeted towards Russia’s elite, while also bringing more direct pain to defund Putin’s ability to wage war.
Namely the west should cut off Russia’s supply of money by banning the purchase of Russian oil.
I realize this action will hurt regular Ukrainians and other Innocent Europeans which is why I also advocate for direct subsidies to reduce the cost of energy for these affected populations, paid for by western governments.
TL;DR: One strategy we might try to make it harder for the elites to wage war would be to stop giving them money to wage war while at the same time temporarily subsidizing energy costs for populations affected by the oil sanctions.
I don't think that's sufficient. You mentioned the collapse of the ruble, this is an outcome that heavily effects Russians but also directly effects the ability for the war to be financed. In the end, you cannot separate the two, in order to apply enough pressure to one you must invariably harm the other.
I also think it is silly to argue that cutting Russia off from this direct subsidy from the west would be insufficient to have chilling effect on Putin’s war - especially when we haven’t even tried. How do you know it is insufficient?
I am bemoaning the fact that there IS at least one precision nuke that would single-handedly hit 30% of Russia’s GDP, cause direct pain to Russia’s oligarchs and elites, and immediate decimate Putin’s war machine - all while doing much less damage to ordinary Russians than broad indiscriminate economic sanctions.
I am bemoaning the fact that this tactical nuke we could drop on Russia’s oil & gas sector is clear and obvious to most everyone involved but would result in economic and political blowback for the west so everyone is burying their head in the sand and pretending the option to stop buying oil from authoritarians who attack our allies doesn’t exist.
I have yet to hear a good argument for why broad economic sanctions against an entire nation and its people are more targeted or more effective than just not buying oil or gas from Russia’s elites and stop directly subsidizing Putin’s war machine.
Perhaps someone here can enlighten me?
What is happening to the Russian people is tragic, but it pales in comparison to what the average Ukrainian is experiencing (shortages of food, medicine, water and basic shelter, psychological terror, maimings, deaths).
We have no other means to put pressure on Putin save arming Ukraine or attacking Russia.
We are going to feel a lot of pain anyway and more the longer that this goes on. Gas prices are already through the roof. Ukraine and Russia are both major grain exporters, meaning this war will have a devastating impact around the world this year. We should be doing everything we can to make sure it stops sooner rather than later even if it means more pain now.
If we cut off this market it would cripple Putin’s war in Ukraine much more effectively than arming Ukrainians on the ground.
Add in energy subsidies to affected customers in need of economic support to offset the inevitable increase in oil/gas prices in the short-term and we can blunt the worst of the pain on regular Europeans.
Why is this proposal not even worth considering? Broad economic sanctions are most definitely not the only option to pressure Putin.
Except, even without sanctions on oil & gas, no one is buying the oil.
https://www.cnn.com/2022/03/03/investing/russia-oil-sanction...
For example 6 days ago The NY Times reported that Shell had stopped buying oil from Russia [0] but that was also fake news.
Shell is now defending their decision to buy 100 metric tons of aural crude from Russia according to multiple reports in the past 24 hours. [1]
Nothing changed, It was all just PR spin to manipulate public opinion. It looks like it worked.
In war the first casualty is the truth.
[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/28/business/russia-oil-compa...
[1] https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/shell-buys-r...
Like I mentioned in the previous post, the main reason is to keep some leverage. It's the biggest financial sanction that can be thrown at them. Essentially all other sanctions were taken, but the last one was kept unused. If Putin escalates against civilians this sanction would likely be used too.
I would like to believe our elected leaders are not so self-serving as to put their political interests above the needs of the Ukrainian people but I’ve seen enough geo—politics in my life that I simply can’t be so naiive.
In essence it is to maintain some leverage, on top of the usual practical and selfish reasons.
In addition Americans are notoriously sensitive to the price of gas (in a similar vein the joke goes that Russia has had two price spikes in Vodka, first in 1917 and second in 1991, maybe we'll get third one soon). If it rises too much they might start to oppose the whole being uppity to Russians thing going on now, which would be bad.